Disrupting Sovereignty: Deleuze and Guattari on the War Machine

This chapter engages with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s analysis of the war machine, suggesting that it contradicts Arendt’s analysis and offers the most radical critique within the radical-juridical paradigm. Premised on the notion that we must rethink sovereignty from ontological difference rather than unity, Deleuze and Guattari radically undermine the indivisibility that defines the classic-juridical conception. Far from being located in one individual or point, sovereignty is always tied to the State, which is a multiplicity that expresses the constantly moving, fluid, and dynamic field of difference. By thinking the social world in terms of heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari undermine the hierarchical conception of sovereignty underpinning the classic-juridical model, but continue to implicitly insist that State sovereignty is tied to the maintenance of juridical order; an order that is always threatened by or in conflict with the war machine that disrupts it. As a consequence, they conclude that sovereign order is always far more unstable and disordered than it appears to be.